Established Monday with a US$5 million grant from Motorola, the DigitalDNA Lab will delve into the problem of getting tomorrow's intelligent household appliances to talk to each other.

Located on the MIT campus in Cambridge, Massachusetts, the new lab will try to figure out networking schemes for the next generation of smart household appliances, digital VCRs and TVs, set-top boxes, smart cars, PCs and personal digital assistants, and communication systems.

The initiative is similar to Sun Microsystems' Jini technology for making Java-based appliances network aware.

Motorola is a major supplier of embedded chips and has been a Media Lab sponsor since 1994. The Media Lab's founder, Nicholas Negroponte, sits on Motorola's board of directors.

Initially, researchers at the DigitalDNA Lab will toil in the same building as the Media Lab. A new building for the lab will be up and running by early 2003.